ASUS ROG STRIX RX 5700 XT OC Review

The first wave of AMD NAVI GPUs are here and today we take a look at the ROG-STRIX-RX5700XT-O8G-GAMING graphics card – carrying the Max Contact Cooler, a factory overclock and trademark ROG features

Product on Review: ROG STRIX RX 5700 XT OC
Manufacturer: ASUS Republic of Gamers
Street Price: USD $500 – AUD $900 – GBP £504

Last month’s release of new next-gen Navi GPUs sent a clear message out that AMD have unfinished business to take care of. Along a similar vein to what has taken place with their phenomenal comeback via Ryzen, the company is making inroads, by taking the fight to AMD in the GPU arena too. The RX 5700 Series definitely shows promise and is their best attempt yet at dethroning the green team.

Along-side the hard launch of the reference design, AMD partners announced their custom models which are now beginning to filter through.

In our first partner card review for AMD Navi, today we are checking out the ASUS ROG STRIX RX 5700 XT. Taking centre stage for this new graphics card is the MaxContact cooler which carries a burly double-heatsink and triple Axial-Tech cooling fans. Accompanying this we also receive a factory overclock to the GPU and trademark ROG features like ‘Fan Connect 2’.

ROG on their STRIX 5700 XT

1440p is the new sweet spot for mainstream gaming, and the ROG Strix Radeon™ RX 5700 XT is armed to dominate the category. Components on the surface of the PCB are precisely soldered with Auto-Extreme Technology and the GPU chip is cooled using MaxContact and a beefy heatsink. On top, three fans leverage our new Axial-tech design, which surpasses our own industry-leading fans from the last generation. In-between those layers are a myriad of additional features like 0dB mode, IP5X dust resistance, a reinforced frame, and more.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding STRIX 5700 XT supplied directly by ASUS:

GPU
NAVI 10 XT
Stream Processor
2560
Video Memory
8GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
256-bit
Engine Clock
1840 MHz
Engine Clock Boost
2035MHz
Memory Clock
1750MHz – 14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
4.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
600W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Triple Fan – Max Contact Cooler
Slot Size
2.7
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
300 x 122 x 52 mm

Closer Look Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video review showing the physical design of this graphics card, highlighting its features and stripping it down by removing the thermal solution. You can watch the video below or click on this link to watch the STRIX 5700 XT Video Review.

Test Setup & Methodology

HOW WE TEST GRAPHICS CARDS

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

HARDWARE

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Graphics Cards on test:
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti
NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2080
ZOTAC NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER Twin Fan
NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2070
NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2060
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1080
NVIDIA GTX 1070
NVIDIA GTX 1060
AMD Radeon Vega 56
AMD Radeon RX 5700
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

Special thanks go to Avermedia, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H150i Pro 360mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Avermedia Live Gamer Extreme 2

BENCHMARKS

If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

Fortnite
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools and FRAPS.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

3DMark Time Spy
3DMark FireStrike
Unigine: SuperPosition
Unigine: Heaven 4.0

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

TEMPERATURE

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

ACOUSTICS

The Max Contact cooler with its Axial-tech fans is quiet when fully loaded. We can of course also use ‘Quiet Mode’ to bring down the noise further but with ‘Performance Mode’ enabled, we feel the card is still reasonably quiet and will not present any noise emission issues.

Overclocking

To overclock the 5700 XT we used the ASUS Tweak II Software since we’re using an ASUS card.

This card already has a factory overclock applied to the GPU but we’re interested to see how far we can push things – and even attempt to increase the memory values above stock.

We were able to increase the power limit and therefore nudge up the GPU clock considerably while also applying over 100MHz increase to the memory clock too. This, in turn allowed us to squeeze out even more performance in-game:

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

Download your copy now

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Download your copy now

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is UL’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine SuperPosition

Superposition is a new-generation benchmark tailored for testing reliability and performance of the latest GPUs. Top-notch visuals, support for VR-devices and an interactive mode with mini-games — the list of features built into Superposition could go on and on.

DX11: Fortnite

Fortnite Battle Royale is the FREE 100-player PvP mode in Fortnite. One giant map. A battle bus. Fortnite building skills and destructible environments combined with intense PvP combat. The last one standing wins.

DX11: Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

DX11: Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a story-driven open-world RPG that immerses you in an epic adventure in the Holy Roman Empire. Avenge your parents’ death as you battle invading forces, go on game-changing quests, and make influential choices.

DX12: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider, and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series.

DX11: F1 2018

F1 2018 is a racing video game and the tenth instalment in the Formula One video game franchise developed and published by Codemasters. The game is based on the 2018 Formula One World Championship and includes all twenty-one circuits from the calendar and all twenty drivers and ten teams competing in the season.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Please note: we’ve used GBP for currency but since this is relative – regardless of which currency you use, this will give you a good indication of value for money.

Conclusion

We’ve encountered many STRIX cards throughout the different NVIDIA and AMD generations – the blueprint has barely changed. Fundamentally, the ROG team aim for high-quality construction, big factory overclocks and effective cooling – these three characteristics remain in the STRIX RX 5700 XT.

Against the reference AMD RX 5700 XT, this STRIX variant provides us with a boost in performance of up to 10 fps thanks to the factory overclock. There is also additional headroom for applying a manual overclock to effectively nudge up the GPU clock speed even further and take the memory clock out of its stock/reference settings.

Cooling is where this STRIX graphics card comes into its own because it nails the two prominent attributes which are essential to improving on AMD’s design – thermal performance and noise emission. With the card in ‘Performance Mode’ users can expect improvements to temperatures by up to 10C. Throughout our testing we experienced low-noise operation, even with the system fully loaded.

The only negative points to comment on are fairly evident, the sheer size of the STRIX RX 5700 XT makes this graphics card suitable for computer cases with ample space, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to use this GPU in a compact chassis. Power consumption is also more demanding with 600W being necessary and 8+8pin connection from the unit being obligatory too.

As we’ve come to expect from ROG’s STRIX GPUs, the pricing is never at the base MSRP. This 5700 XT is positioned at USD $500 – AUD $900 – GBP £504, making it one of the more expensive models to purchase for this class of GPU. This will likely put many off, with rival models offering something similar for $100 / £100 less.

Those wanting to lock down a top-performing RX 5700 XT should definitely consider what the ROG team has to offer!

Pros
+ Stylish design
+ Includes protective backplate
+ Additional features: Dual-BIOS, Fan Connect 2 & more!
+ Low-noise fans
+ Idle fan stop technology
+ Features a factory overclock
+ Overclocks reasonably well

Cons
– Expensive compared to rivals
– Massive footprint
– Requires more power, plus 8+8pin

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

Stay connected with the Vortez Social Media pages:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Join in with the discussions on Discord